CHAPTER 10
Havre, Montana
Commander Gregory ordered Tom and another man to pick up the body. They carried it to what Tom thought was a drainage ditch located on the opposite side of the entrance.
A powerful stench wafted at him as he made his way toward it. He nearly dropped the body, it was so strong. Holding his breath as he reached the edge, he peered in.
This time, he did drop the body. It wasn’t a drainage ditch.
It was a huge pit, maybe twenty feet in circumference and at least ten feet deep. Tom couldn’t tell its exact depth because of the bodies that covered the bottom of it.
The bodies lay at least three deep, and they had been there for a while. It looked like the ones on the bottom had been burned, and then new bodies had just been tossed in on top of them. There must have been over a hundred corpses, rotting away.
Transfixed by the morbid sight, Tom couldn’t move, couldn’t think. How could this be happening? Why the hell had he been brought here? Who were these guys?
The guard accompanying them slammed him in the back with the butt of his rifle. Tom’s back arched as he crashed to his knees.
“Pick it up and toss it in,” the guard ordered, his tone bored.
Tom scrambled back to his feet, his lower back throbbing, and helped the other man toss the body into the ditch. Bile rose in his throat as he watched the body bounce as it landed on the other corpses. He heard a crack as someone’s bones broke.
On the walk back, he tried to keep his face a mask. But he knew shock was splashed across his features. In line again and feeling eyes on him, he looked up to find the commander watching him. Smug. The commander looked smug.
Gregory ordered the shackled men into the enclosure and, collectively, they followed him through the entrance, surrounded by the four commandos. There were no buildings inside the wall, only one old RV near the entrance that had seen better days. And the area encased by the wall was huge – at least the size of a football field.
The enclosure was a beehive of activity. There were groups of men working in gaping holes deep into the ground. Huge mounds of dirt were scattered around the enclosure. Ramps led from the surface to the subterranean trenches. And there were a dozen eight-foot tables where men sifted dirt through large, screened squares.
Tom could hear shovels striking the ground as they walked through the enclosure. The men were too far down in the ground, though, to be seen.
Other men in tattered clothes moved quickly through the enclosure: pushing wheelbarrows full of dirt up the ramps, emptying them at the dirt mounds, and then quickly making their way back down into the trenches again.
Tom’s group was led to an undisturbed part of the landscape that was marked with orange grid lines spray-painted onto the ground.
Gregory cast a scathing look across the men. “You will dig here. If you are slow, if you refuse to work, or if we don’t like you, you will be replaced.”
Tom had no doubts what that meant.
“And if you hit anything solid, and I mean anything, you stop immediately and call over a guard. Do you understand me?” Gregory pinned each man with a glare.
Timidly, they all nodded back.
With a grunt, Gregory turned away and handed them over to the man who’d slammed Tom in the back with the butt of his rifle.
“Line up, maggots,” the guard barked as he pointed to the ground in front of a wheelbarrow to his right. The men quickly complied.
“Your restraints will be clipped and you will grab a shovel. Then you will immediately go to the area I point to, and start digging. Do you understand, maggots?”
The men nodded, although most of them still maintained a bewildered look on their faces.
As the line moved forward, Tom watched the man standing silently behind the wheelbarrow piled high with shovels. The man stared at the ground, and never once looked up. It seemed like an incredible effort for him to stay standing. He was emaciated to the point of being skeletal.
Tom couldn’t even tell the man’s race or age due to the dust that covered him and the skin that sagged from his face, distorting his features. He looked like a concentration camp survivor. Although, Tom thought, looking around, the term “survivor” was probably optimistic at this point.
Each man approached the wheelbarrow and a guard cut off his restraints. He retrieved a shovel and was shoved towards a spot to begin digging.
No one said a word or made any protest. When he reached the front of the line, Tom took his shovel just like the rest. He was directed with another inmate to begin digging in a section at the outer rim of the gridlines. Tom looked around for a moment as he reached his section.
“What are you waiting for?” bellowed a guard, kicking a man on the other side of the grid in the thigh when he did not begin digging fast enough.
Tom quickly turned his attention to the ground and began to dig. And he didn’t stop for hours. The sun was actually sinking in the sky before he even looked up again.
His back ached, his hands were a mass of blisters and cramping. He still didn’t understand why he was here, but there was one thing that was one thing he knew with absolute clarity: He was a slave.